Provisioning is a general term that is commonly used in the field of mobile communications in reference to the process by which services provided by a service provider are managed. In accordance with the teachings described herein, systems and methods are provided for triggering a provisioning event in a service provider using a provisioning request message generated by an external system. A provisioning system may be used to receive the provisioning request message from the external system and transmit information in the provisioning request message to the service provider to trigger the provisioning event. The provisioning request message may have a data structure that includes a header section and a body section. The body section may contain a provisioning entity section that includes information identifying an entity to which the provisioning event pertains, wherein the provisioning entity section includes one or more attributes defined by the external system.